Disaster Recovery Planning

Departmental disaster recovery planning

Disaster recovery planning involves the process, policies, and procedures that enable delivery of critical technical services to Indiana University in the event of natural or man-made disaster.

Disaster recovery (DR) is an integral part of the overall business continuity program. While business continuity is concerned with continuation of the business of the university, disaster recovery or information technology business continuity is focused on the continued operation and function of technology to support those business functions.

A disaster recovery program ensures the technology that supports the business of the university will continue to function after an event occurs. Which departments and offices should think about DR? Any that use any form of IT, including email, to conduct business.

The purpose of this document is to help departments form a disaster recovery plan. Many services hosted by university departments are key in conducting daily university business; as such, plans for these services to provide continued functionality in the event of disaster is paramount.

Developing your disaster recovery plan

We have provided a strategy template to use in developing your departmental disaster recovery plan. Prioritizing your services from most critical to least critical is key to developing a useful plan, which should clearly define the steps and equipment needed to bring these critical services back online.

These steps should include who to contact, where backup data is stored and where new equipment should be sourced from if replacement is required.

Storing your disaster recovery plan

Indiana University’s IU Ready service should be used for storing your DR plan and business continuity plan (BCP).

The IU Ready service, found on One.IU, helps university administration understand the resources and dependencies needed to help your department recover from a major disaster, and provides a centralized location for storing these documents in a secure off-site location.

Auditing your disaster recovery plan

Regulary auditing your DR plan to reflect changes in your services is important to ensure that those tasked with bringing these services back up are working with the correct information. Changes to services such as IP address, VLAN, Administrator access and firewall settings should be updated as soon as these changes are made to the system.

It is also important to audit access to the IU Ready plan and its documents to reflect changes in staffing, contact information, and administrative access. Outdated information in your DR plan could result in additional down time.